Doubtless you shared Sordel's shock. An ambassador was among those recently rioting in London! Some Ruritanian minor nobility, one might presume, tired of cowering behind the windows of his embassy in silk sash and monocle while the people of England marched for civil rights and HDMI cables.
But, hang on.
It was an Olympics ambassador.
One of the things that the media are very good at is inventing grandiloquently entitled professions when it suits them. Robert Sebbage, murdered while on holiday in Greece, was evidently an England mascot which, with all deference to his better qualities, seemed to be a stretch of terminology.
A 17-year-old who turned herself into the police for looting Richer Sounds, "had been learning ballet since the age of seven and fears that she will now lose her place at dance school". Sordel tends to think the age of seven as a rather late start for ballet, but she is described by The Times as a ballerina which, on the evidence of the article, is both unlikely and something of an insult to proper ballerinas, who are typically the principal dancers in ballet companies.
Our "Olympic ambassador" is Chelsea Ives, an athlete whose competition results are readily available online. Her main disciplines would appear to involve running, throwing things and jumping (skills for which she may have found a practical use) but being a reasonably promising sportswoman and one of eight thousand doing voluntary work to promote the Olympics does not make her an Olympic "ambassador", except in the fevered brains of news editors and the British Olympic committee: neither of whom are strangers to overstatement.
Gushing lists of these glorious occupations were trotted out in newspapers, wall posts and tweets. Graphic designers evidently bathe in champagne and have white truffles for loofahs. Social workers have uniforms of spun gold with diamond inlay. Semi-professional footballers (ah, how it must have hurt the news editors to add that semi-) use bankers for their footstools and millionaires for their spitoons.
The problem with this "title inflation" is that the impression has been given that - far from those suffering from social deprivation - the rioters were all members of the urban nobility, living it large, them with their degrees and flashy careers.
One problem with rioting? It leads to a lot of heat, and not so much light.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The Hours Crawl By
The essence of "water cooler television" used to be that a programme was so memorable that everyone at work would be talking about it the next day. These days it's a branding thing: watch this thing tonight or tomorrow you might have nothing to talk about.
Case in point: The Hour, the BBC's one-size-fits-all drama. It's part history, part social history, part breathless romance, part spy story, part detective story. The general idea seems to be to mix up all the genres so thoroughly that the audience won't even know which way is up, and it seems to be working, since Sordel is still resentfully watching it several weeks beyond its logical expiration date.
Until the most recent episode, none of the actors in The Hour seemed quite to have hit upon the perfect acting strategy for the drama. Romola Garai (only happy when a strand of hair is falling fetchingly over one eye) is one half blushing schoolgirl and one half strident feminist. Ben Whishaw (playing a journalist who would evidently be brilliant if the writers were able to supply evidence in the form of slick dialogue) is half pouting public school intellectual and half working class hero. A line of motley runs up the centre of each of them.
The most creditable work in the main cast is being done by Dominic West, who has relied thus far on a sweetly avuncular smile and arched eyebrow to suggest that he is keeping his best acting chops in reserve for some other programme, any other programme. Channelling Roger Moore is a skill that every great actor should have in his toolbag.
The latest episode, however, opened up the field to an actress who had the thing to a nicety. Jessica Hynes (previously known as Jessica Stevenson and best known for her roles in Spaced and The Royle Family) might be said to have played the entire thing for laughs, deploying a range of cod-period tics that have never hitherto been rolled into the same character.
There is such a thing as "mannered acting", but this crossed into some territory beyond High Camp, not even pausing to draw breath at the staging post of "a right Royal piss-take".
As water-cooler television goes, The Hour is deplorably tepid, but one senses that once it is done and dusted it will be the comic actors who add it to their c.v.s with the greatest pride, and the principals who claim to have been "resting" in 2011.
Case in point: The Hour, the BBC's one-size-fits-all drama. It's part history, part social history, part breathless romance, part spy story, part detective story. The general idea seems to be to mix up all the genres so thoroughly that the audience won't even know which way is up, and it seems to be working, since Sordel is still resentfully watching it several weeks beyond its logical expiration date.
Until the most recent episode, none of the actors in The Hour seemed quite to have hit upon the perfect acting strategy for the drama. Romola Garai (only happy when a strand of hair is falling fetchingly over one eye) is one half blushing schoolgirl and one half strident feminist. Ben Whishaw (playing a journalist who would evidently be brilliant if the writers were able to supply evidence in the form of slick dialogue) is half pouting public school intellectual and half working class hero. A line of motley runs up the centre of each of them.
The most creditable work in the main cast is being done by Dominic West, who has relied thus far on a sweetly avuncular smile and arched eyebrow to suggest that he is keeping his best acting chops in reserve for some other programme, any other programme. Channelling Roger Moore is a skill that every great actor should have in his toolbag.
The latest episode, however, opened up the field to an actress who had the thing to a nicety. Jessica Hynes (previously known as Jessica Stevenson and best known for her roles in Spaced and The Royle Family) might be said to have played the entire thing for laughs, deploying a range of cod-period tics that have never hitherto been rolled into the same character.
There is such a thing as "mannered acting", but this crossed into some territory beyond High Camp, not even pausing to draw breath at the staging post of "a right Royal piss-take".
As water-cooler television goes, The Hour is deplorably tepid, but one senses that once it is done and dusted it will be the comic actors who add it to their c.v.s with the greatest pride, and the principals who claim to have been "resting" in 2011.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
A Fate Worse Than Death
Sordel recently argued that - far from taking society to some new moral nadir - restoring capital punishment is like a leafy suburb somewhere on the line between The City of God and our current societal Sodom. Naturally this is far from an argument on behalf of the restoration of capital punishment (just because bad things happen, no need to add to them!) but let us turn out attention for a moment to how bad capital punishment really is as a legal resort.
How would it be if you could experience the fear and discomfort of death and not die?
Good punishment? Bad?
Waterboarding was routinely used by the U.S. as an interrogation technique. For the person being interrogated in this way, the experience is said to be similar to being drowned. Some claim it's torture, but it was contended by the Bush administration that it is not. Either way, we're not killing the person, so why worry, right?
Waterboarding does not infringe the natural right to life, and it can be used both as retribution against the convict and as a deterrent. Since it is not a capital punishment, it is proportionate for all sorts of crime. It's cheap, causes no permanent (physical) damage ... what's not to like?
No wonder that U.S. interrogators apparently felt that it was okay to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.
(No wonder there is such understandable anxiety in America that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might cheat justice and elude the death penalty.)
Of course, that's just the United States, and it can be argued that the use of waterboarding was primarily preventative rather than punitive. Interrogation may have saved many more lives than it ruined and - unless you actually believe in natural rights - the end (on a purely Utilitarian calculation) often does justify the means.
My philosophical concern is not whether waterboarding itself is justifiable, but rather this: is there no number of waterboardings that equal, from the standpoint of retributive punishment, one actual execution?
Because, if other punishments (including those inflicted without due legal process) can exceed in cruelty capital punishment, then why are we drawing this artificial moral line?
Why do we strain out a gnat and swallow a camel?
How would it be if you could experience the fear and discomfort of death and not die?
Good punishment? Bad?
Waterboarding was routinely used by the U.S. as an interrogation technique. For the person being interrogated in this way, the experience is said to be similar to being drowned. Some claim it's torture, but it was contended by the Bush administration that it is not. Either way, we're not killing the person, so why worry, right?
Waterboarding does not infringe the natural right to life, and it can be used both as retribution against the convict and as a deterrent. Since it is not a capital punishment, it is proportionate for all sorts of crime. It's cheap, causes no permanent (physical) damage ... what's not to like?
No wonder that U.S. interrogators apparently felt that it was okay to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003.
(No wonder there is such understandable anxiety in America that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might cheat justice and elude the death penalty.)
Of course, that's just the United States, and it can be argued that the use of waterboarding was primarily preventative rather than punitive. Interrogation may have saved many more lives than it ruined and - unless you actually believe in natural rights - the end (on a purely Utilitarian calculation) often does justify the means.
My philosophical concern is not whether waterboarding itself is justifiable, but rather this: is there no number of waterboardings that equal, from the standpoint of retributive punishment, one actual execution?
Because, if other punishments (including those inflicted without due legal process) can exceed in cruelty capital punishment, then why are we drawing this artificial moral line?
Why do we strain out a gnat and swallow a camel?
Monday, August 8, 2011
Hang 'Em (Even in Conservation Areas)
Good news everybody! You have a fundamental human right to a satellite dish. When it comes to human rights, the BSkyB is not the limit, but it is certainly the icing on the cake.
To say that human rights are a misunderstood area of thought would be an understatement, mainly because legal rights and natural rights have been blurred to the point at which they are difficult to disentangle. If you infringe someone's legal right to a satellite dish, you have committed a crime; if you infringe someone's natural right to life, you have committed a ... sin?
Opponents of capital punishment like to hedge their argument around with practical considerations, but claims that it is ineffective or inefficient cannot explain the fervency with which they argue their position. Lots of things are ineffective and inefficient; the problem with capital punishment is that it is morally repugnant, even to many people who are not religious.
The natural right to life is, however, very weakly defended in several areas of public life. There is no legal right to life for soldiers in a war, but the natural right to life is inalienable, so why do we go along so meekly when our country wages elective wars on, for example, the soldiers of Libya?
If you won't cry for those, how about civilian women and children killed in Afghanistan by NATO bombing? (Perhaps you shrug at all death in war?)
How about the extra-judicial murder of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell on Gibraltar? How about the fatal shooting by police this month of Mark Duggan, an incident exploited by those rioting in North London?
If they were too "guilty" for you, how about the extra-judicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes?
Every single day people all around the world (and sometimes in the United Kingdom) are being killed without the due process of trial or appeal. If you are genuinely appalled by the state killing people in your name, capital punishment should be the least of your worries.
We aren't just on a slippery slope ... we are already right at the bottom of one.
So, what right do campaigners believe themselves to be protecting? A high ethical standard that our society seems largely to have abandoned? Or a legal right to life that is one short step in triviality from the legal right to watch it all on Sky?
To say that human rights are a misunderstood area of thought would be an understatement, mainly because legal rights and natural rights have been blurred to the point at which they are difficult to disentangle. If you infringe someone's legal right to a satellite dish, you have committed a crime; if you infringe someone's natural right to life, you have committed a ... sin?
Opponents of capital punishment like to hedge their argument around with practical considerations, but claims that it is ineffective or inefficient cannot explain the fervency with which they argue their position. Lots of things are ineffective and inefficient; the problem with capital punishment is that it is morally repugnant, even to many people who are not religious.
The natural right to life is, however, very weakly defended in several areas of public life. There is no legal right to life for soldiers in a war, but the natural right to life is inalienable, so why do we go along so meekly when our country wages elective wars on, for example, the soldiers of Libya?
If you won't cry for those, how about civilian women and children killed in Afghanistan by NATO bombing? (Perhaps you shrug at all death in war?)
How about the extra-judicial murder of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell on Gibraltar? How about the fatal shooting by police this month of Mark Duggan, an incident exploited by those rioting in North London?
If they were too "guilty" for you, how about the extra-judicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes?
Every single day people all around the world (and sometimes in the United Kingdom) are being killed without the due process of trial or appeal. If you are genuinely appalled by the state killing people in your name, capital punishment should be the least of your worries.
We aren't just on a slippery slope ... we are already right at the bottom of one.
So, what right do campaigners believe themselves to be protecting? A high ethical standard that our society seems largely to have abandoned? Or a legal right to life that is one short step in triviality from the legal right to watch it all on Sky?
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Out For The Count
Like the Periodical Cicada, Marcus de Sautoy is observed only occasionally on British television and presumably at prime intervals. When last seen, in 2009, Sordel's favourite boffin was frolicking on a beach with everyman-for-hire Alan Davies, but now he is out on his own, trying to solve The Code, which is his post-Langdonian nomenclature for boring old mathematics.
"The Code" is evidently all around us, a mysterious and enthralling puzzle that demands our awed investigation. Consider, for example, an ancient standing circle whose circumference and diameter Marcus enterprisingly appraised with a tape measure before sitting down with a notebook to divide the larger number by the smaller. There we go: 3.2 ... the number that underpins all things.
Well, perhaps not. It turns out that the number that underpins all things is not 3.2 but another number. If you can work out what that number is then you are streets ahead of this programme, where the well-meaning du Sautoy attempted to demonstrate all sorts of extraordinary things and failed conspicuously.
From the statistics of a fisherman's daily catch, knowing only how many years that fisherman had been fishing, du Sautoy was able to work out the weight of the largest Dover sole that the fisherman had ever caught. Three pounds, declared Professor du Sautoy. When the fisherman said that his biggest Dover sole had been "three to three-and-a-half pounds" one half expected the mathematician (who looks disarmingly like Simon Pegg's smarter brother) to turn to the camera and say "well, we all know what liars fishermen are."
The problem with all this popularisation should have been obvious at the outset: boring old mathematics works wonderfully on paper, but du Sautoy's attempts to show it in action run up against the fundamental inability of the audience to keep pace with even his most pedestrian insights. Leaning over the shoulder of a flight controller, du Sautoy explained how the calculations involved in Radar depend on the Imaginary Unit. (Go on, click through that link ... I dare you.)
The bemused controller (presumably thinking: who let this guy in here and where's his handler?) smiled with good-natured befuddlement and said that there was nothing imaginary going on in his tower.
But of course there was.
Imaginary educational television: a world where experiments that don't work are substituted for explanations that you can't possibly understand.
"The Code" is evidently all around us, a mysterious and enthralling puzzle that demands our awed investigation. Consider, for example, an ancient standing circle whose circumference and diameter Marcus enterprisingly appraised with a tape measure before sitting down with a notebook to divide the larger number by the smaller. There we go: 3.2 ... the number that underpins all things.
Well, perhaps not. It turns out that the number that underpins all things is not 3.2 but another number. If you can work out what that number is then you are streets ahead of this programme, where the well-meaning du Sautoy attempted to demonstrate all sorts of extraordinary things and failed conspicuously.
From the statistics of a fisherman's daily catch, knowing only how many years that fisherman had been fishing, du Sautoy was able to work out the weight of the largest Dover sole that the fisherman had ever caught. Three pounds, declared Professor du Sautoy. When the fisherman said that his biggest Dover sole had been "three to three-and-a-half pounds" one half expected the mathematician (who looks disarmingly like Simon Pegg's smarter brother) to turn to the camera and say "well, we all know what liars fishermen are."
The problem with all this popularisation should have been obvious at the outset: boring old mathematics works wonderfully on paper, but du Sautoy's attempts to show it in action run up against the fundamental inability of the audience to keep pace with even his most pedestrian insights. Leaning over the shoulder of a flight controller, du Sautoy explained how the calculations involved in Radar depend on the Imaginary Unit. (Go on, click through that link ... I dare you.)
The bemused controller (presumably thinking: who let this guy in here and where's his handler?) smiled with good-natured befuddlement and said that there was nothing imaginary going on in his tower.
But of course there was.
Imaginary educational television: a world where experiments that don't work are substituted for explanations that you can't possibly understand.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Gee, Officer Krupke
Anyone looking for a handy excuse for bad behaviour can now shorten their list by reference to Charlie Gilmour, whose defence on a charge of violent disorder seemed to use an awful lot of them to little effect.
It was regarded by the defence as a mitigating factor that Gilmour was drunk (in addition to being on a cocktail of valium and LSD). David Spens, the defending QC, also advanced one of those arguments that would be enough to make any mother proud: "up until Topshop, the worst of his behaviour was playing the fool, showing off, posing for the cameras." High praise indeed.
It was argued on his behalf that the Cambridge history student was unaware of the significance of the Cenotaph when swinging from it by a flag. The Judge, Nicholas Price QC, specifically rejected this claim when handing down a 16 month jail term today.
More troublesome, however, was the claim that Gilmour's psychological decline had been due to having been rejected by his natural father, the poet Heathcote Williams. This was a case in which family looms large.
According to the headlines, Gilmour is the son of Dave Gilmour, and much of the brouhaha attendant on his involvement in the riots sprang from the idea that he was the feckless millionaire offspring of a rocker who had quite possibly served as a very poor moral role model to him.
Son of Rock Star in Riot is a headline; Son of Poet in Riot less so.
Of course, to all intents and purposes Dave Gilmour is indeed Charlie's father, having adopted him when the boy was only four or five, yet such is the destiny of blood that the boy looks very like his natural father: slender, with black wavy hair sufficiently striking to have persuaded Charlie to register with a modelling agency.
Who knows what psychological drama may have unfolded in Charlie's mind if indeed he were to have been rejected by his poetic sire? And, who cares?
Investigations into the roots of crime are doubtless of great sociological interest, but the circularity of blame becomes less than compelling when the crimes are of the order of throwing a waste bin or sitting on the bonnet of a car.
We do not inquire into the root causes of crimes that are trivial, and we cannot afford to consider the root causes of crimes that are immense.
It was regarded by the defence as a mitigating factor that Gilmour was drunk (in addition to being on a cocktail of valium and LSD). David Spens, the defending QC, also advanced one of those arguments that would be enough to make any mother proud: "up until Topshop, the worst of his behaviour was playing the fool, showing off, posing for the cameras." High praise indeed.
It was argued on his behalf that the Cambridge history student was unaware of the significance of the Cenotaph when swinging from it by a flag. The Judge, Nicholas Price QC, specifically rejected this claim when handing down a 16 month jail term today.
More troublesome, however, was the claim that Gilmour's psychological decline had been due to having been rejected by his natural father, the poet Heathcote Williams. This was a case in which family looms large.
According to the headlines, Gilmour is the son of Dave Gilmour, and much of the brouhaha attendant on his involvement in the riots sprang from the idea that he was the feckless millionaire offspring of a rocker who had quite possibly served as a very poor moral role model to him.
Son of Rock Star in Riot is a headline; Son of Poet in Riot less so.
Of course, to all intents and purposes Dave Gilmour is indeed Charlie's father, having adopted him when the boy was only four or five, yet such is the destiny of blood that the boy looks very like his natural father: slender, with black wavy hair sufficiently striking to have persuaded Charlie to register with a modelling agency.
Who knows what psychological drama may have unfolded in Charlie's mind if indeed he were to have been rejected by his poetic sire? And, who cares?
Investigations into the roots of crime are doubtless of great sociological interest, but the circularity of blame becomes less than compelling when the crimes are of the order of throwing a waste bin or sitting on the bonnet of a car.
We do not inquire into the root causes of crimes that are trivial, and we cannot afford to consider the root causes of crimes that are immense.
Long Spoons, Short Memories, Tall Stories
Short of toppling a statue of Rupert Murdoch and beating at it with their shoes, Britain's MPs could scarcely have depicted themselves in recent days more like the long-suffering victims of the despot's whip.
For displays of pomposity, self-congratulation, mutual back-slapping and retrospective posturing, the last week has known no equal. There were members of parliament standing up in the Commons on Wednesday declaring that in their handling of the News Corporation scandal they had collectively expunged memories of the Expenses scandal.
Gordon Brown - a man who can turn any amount of public sympathy to eye-rolling apathy with a single word - explained to skeptical government benches that it would all have been done on his watch but for those meddlesome kids at the Civil Service.
Faced with an open goal, the honourable members have not so much kicked a ball through it as dived bodily into the net. As Sordel writes, there are politicians, responding to the news of the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, flailing wildly in self-made toils in their desperation to press some new demand.
Yet where was all this a month ago?
To the peasants who stream, torches in hand, to Baron Frankenstein's castle, the news that this is the birthplace of the monster is at least news. Indignation is at least comprehensible.
Britain's politicians can hardly claim innocence in the original and subsequent cover-ups of wrongdoing at the News of the World. If Rebekah Brooks had a fiduciary responsibility (to know who was being paid by her paper, and for what) then so did politicians: to ensure that the investigation into the original hacking case was a little more probing than accepting the assurances of the very organisation being investigated.
The story of the News International scandal is not only about journalists going rogue in search of a story. The greater blame falls on the police and government that were supposed to prevent or punish that wrongdoing.
The spite with which MPs are attacking the Murdochs would perhaps be justified in small boys overpowering a bully. It rings false from people hitherto only too happy to turn a blind eye for the chance of an invitation to dinner.
For displays of pomposity, self-congratulation, mutual back-slapping and retrospective posturing, the last week has known no equal. There were members of parliament standing up in the Commons on Wednesday declaring that in their handling of the News Corporation scandal they had collectively expunged memories of the Expenses scandal.
Gordon Brown - a man who can turn any amount of public sympathy to eye-rolling apathy with a single word - explained to skeptical government benches that it would all have been done on his watch but for those meddlesome kids at the Civil Service.
Faced with an open goal, the honourable members have not so much kicked a ball through it as dived bodily into the net. As Sordel writes, there are politicians, responding to the news of the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, flailing wildly in self-made toils in their desperation to press some new demand.
Yet where was all this a month ago?
To the peasants who stream, torches in hand, to Baron Frankenstein's castle, the news that this is the birthplace of the monster is at least news. Indignation is at least comprehensible.
Britain's politicians can hardly claim innocence in the original and subsequent cover-ups of wrongdoing at the News of the World. If Rebekah Brooks had a fiduciary responsibility (to know who was being paid by her paper, and for what) then so did politicians: to ensure that the investigation into the original hacking case was a little more probing than accepting the assurances of the very organisation being investigated.
The story of the News International scandal is not only about journalists going rogue in search of a story. The greater blame falls on the police and government that were supposed to prevent or punish that wrongdoing.
The spite with which MPs are attacking the Murdochs would perhaps be justified in small boys overpowering a bully. It rings false from people hitherto only too happy to turn a blind eye for the chance of an invitation to dinner.
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